Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Arm Straps

I got the arm straps done with the help of my mom. We used premade bias tape from Hancock Fabric (like Joann). The specific information is that it was 1" wide brown bias tape for quilting. This means that it is a bit thicker than some of the other bias tape there. The width of the bias tape was pretty much spot on and at a cost of under $2 for 3 yards that's not too bad. We ended up having to get a second package to finish it.

Going along the lines of planning it out first, we happened to have a piece of ribbon from a gift that someone gave us for Christmas that just happened to be the right length to measure everything. The straps consist of one long piece across the entire back, two loops from that straight piece over the shoulder, and then two loops that go around the outside of the arms.

The actual sewing was pretty straightforward since we just had to stitch the sides of the bias tape together. We were able to use the entire 3 yard length for everything excluding the loops around the outside of the arms. The forward loops and the straight back were stitched together with the tape folded over at a 45 degree angle.

In the reference images you can see two buckles in the front where the outside loops attach to the forward loop. We decided to make this an actual functional loop that would allow for adjustment of the outside loop. The buckles were bought at Hancock for about $3 and it was put together much like a shoulder bag strap.

I think the straps came out pretty nice and from a distance it actually looks a bit like leather.

Colossalcon this past summer was my first anime convention and I had a lot of fun so I am planning on attending Ohayocon 10 at the end of Jan, 2010. One of the largest aspects of anime conventions is cosplay. For those who do not know, cosplay is dressing up as some character from a show, game, movie, or anything else. Basically people pick characters they like and dress up like them.

My planned cosplay is Strider Hiryu from Marvel vs. Capcom, an arcade fighting game a friend introduced me to back in high school. I only played the first one so I will be basing the cosplay on the character design from the first one.

The bulk of the clothing has been completed since that's what I worked on when I went home for break. My mom helped out a lot since she has a sewing machine and a good amount of experience with it. The woodworking was done by myself with a few tips from my stepfather. This is my first time doing any sort of cosplay so there is certainly a lot that I can improve, but I see this mostly as a learning opportunity. Hopefully it will allow me to pick up a lot more skills like sewing, woodworking, and painting.

Pants

The pants were probably the easiest part of the clothing. We first watched a video on Youtube to get an idea of how other people made the pattern. Then we took a pair of pajamas, turned it inside out and took a look at the shape of the front and back piece of cloth. We decided the best way to approach it would be to cut four pieces of fabric, one for each leg front and back. The hardest part about it was to put curvature at the top for it to conform better to the body as well as account for a few inches extra when sitting down.

As far as stitching everything together, the two halves of the front were joined as well as the two parts for the back. After that, the front and back were joined and then all the edges were hemmed to make it look better cosmetically as well as prevent the edge from fraying. An elastic band was put in to serve as a waistband.

Shirt/Vest

The shirt looks like it is similar to the Japanese "gi" except that there are no sleeves. Unfortunately I did not bring my kendo gi and hakama home so there was no really good template to have on hand. We ended up using a T-shirt as the base template and constructing it out of a total of 3 pieces - one for the back and one for each side of the front. The right half will fold over to the left first and then the left flap will fold over to the right. The left side will be the one that will be most visible when completed.

One of the tough parts was finding the right curvature for the two halves to make the V-cut in the front look right. We first used newspaper to make the pattern and to get an idea of what the finished product will look like.

The sewing of the three parts was relatively straightforward. The one additional detail is the addition of approximately one inch bias tape on the collar and around the edge of the two halves of the front. Bias tape needs to be cut at a 45 degree diagonal in relation to the fibers of the cloth. The other tricky part was the sleeve since it shouldn't be too short or too long.

Cypher Sword

Strider's signature weapon is his cypher called the Falchion. The cypher is triangular in shape but fairly long, about the length of the legs. There are two handles, much like a tonfa. I had great difficulty in getting any good reference pictures for this and spent a lot of time deliberating over how to make it. I sketched up a rough design in Solidworks but when it finally came time to make it I decided to redraw it by hand. I settled on using the sprite sheet from the original Marvel vs. Capcom as my base reference.

I am using some leftover wood we have (I believe it's from when we finished our basement). The wood is 3/4" thick whitewood, which comes from spruce and is similar to pine but a little less dense and is also softer. The handles are constructed from PVC pipe and I am using a T shape connector at the center. There are pictures with the shorter handle (the one perpendicular to the handle in line with the blade) both in the same plane as the edge of the blade as well as on the plane of the flat of the blade. I will be going with the handle in the plane of the edge of the blade as it is the logical way for him to execute the attacks shown in the game.

The handle was cut partway with the table saw and finished off with a hand saw and chisel. This is becuase the table saw cuts more of the wood at the bottom as opposed to the surface which is only important when not making a complete through cut. The handle was cut to fit inside 3/4" PVC pipe (inside diameter) so I had to file down the corners of the handle to make it rounder (basic trigonometry in action). The PVC size was chosen because of the maximum thickness of the wood.

After drawing the design of the blade onto the surface of the wood, I
cut a scrap piece of wood first that had the same angle as the angle
that the blade is shaped. This will allow me to still use the guide rail
on the table saw I'm using. The problem is that the angle is very
shallow so even with the piece of wood and the guide rail it was still
difficult to get the cut accurate. I more or less free-handed the second
side and ended up going in about 1/16 of an inch about halfway down.
It's not too noticeable but when I compare the two sides I can see where
it's at. The faces were also cut at an angle to make it more like an
actual blade, but I kept about 1/4" thickness even at the edge to make
sure it would be structurally sound.

The next step was to cover the handle in Gorilla Glue and then let it sit for about 10 minutes. The glue will expand some during this time. During that time I secured the PVC handle to the T connector using PVC primer and cement. If you use that be sure to act quickly since it sets in about 30 seconds. After inserting the Gorilla Glue coated handle into the PVC+connector, I let it sit overnight. The next morning the glue had expanded to fill the inside of the pipe, ensuring a secure bond.

I had a lot of difficulty with building up the trapezoidal part covering the connector on the weapon. I first cut out the shape I wanted using cereal box cardboard and attached about 3 layers on each side with some Bondo to help fill the space since the connector sits at a larger thickness compared to the actual blade. This was then covered up using papier mache with a mixture of flour and water as the glue. I applied about 10 layers of papier mache using a hair dryer to speed up the process and allowing me to do more than just one layer a day.

After getting the rough shape I tried to use some plastic wood (a type of wood putty) to cover the outside and provide a smooth surface to paint on. The wood putty did not go on as well as I had hoped and it didn't bond very well since it would just break off when I tried to sand the edges.

After getting it as smooth as I could I covered it with an additional layer of the papier mache glue, which actually self leveled some. The entire thing was then primed using Rust-Oleum Automotive Primer (same stuff I use for my models) and then sanded using 100 and 400 grit sandpaper. Then the whole thing was primed again and wet sanded using 400 grit sandpaper.

Finally I covered it using Rust-Oleum metallic spray paint in a silver color. It's shiny, but not quite a mirror finish like chrome or polished silver. I'm not completely satisfied with how it turned out and might have to repaint it later but for now I need to work on all the other props.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

This is going to be the last update before I post some final pictures.

Since the last WIP I masked off the leg and painted the boots and gloves a brown color. Masking was done using mostly Tamiya tape. For some areas I made my own thin tape with a fresh Xacto blade and a ruler. The belt was painted black and then the buckle was painted in gold. The belt was masked off and then the clothes were painted using yellow. The hair was painted using just a lighter yellow. Finally, the band on the right sleeve was painted using grey.

After this all the details were hand painted. These details include the buttons on the clothes, the trim for the collar, the Hellsing badge on the left breast and any minor touchups that were needed. The face was pretty tough, especially the eyes since it is a 1/8 figure and everything is pretty small. I was using a #0 brush but maybe I need to get ones even smaller in order to get the small details.

The base was painted using Delta Creamcoats and Tamiya acrylics. I first used a thinned black to make the light grey stones, then mixed in some Delta Creamcoat browns and oranges to achieve various other colors. After this I used a very thinned out Tamiya black to make a wash and to fill in the gaps between stones. The gaps between cobblestones on the street is usually not stark white (the color of the plaster) simply due to dirt and grime.

I still need to flat coat the face and then use future to make areas such as the eyes and lips more glossy in contrast to the rest of the face. After that I'm planning on building a light box so I can take some good final pictures.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

This is a lot of firsts for me - my first resin kit, my first work in prog, and I'm also trying a lot of new techniques. I've only built two Gundam kits before this, the 1/100 HG Tallgeese III and the MG God Gundam. I airbrushed both but I am still trying to learn a lot of new things since I was not completely satisfied with how they turned out. I got interested in figure kits after seeing FilmMkr's works on the FichtenFoo Forums.

This particular kit is the 1/8 Seras Victoria from Hellsing and was purchased from e2046 about a year ago. I have been working on this on and off for the past year, but did not really have much time to work on it due to school. I finally got around to sitting down and working on this kit quite a bit in the last week or so since finals just got done.

It's a pretty simple kit which is why I chose this one to start with. I first soaked all the parts in a degreaser (PurplePower equivalent) and then scrubbed it with some SoftScrub. The hardest part was the cleanup of the "wing," which is what occupied most of my time during the cleanup. I primed, sanded, fixed defects, and then repeated the process several times.

Since this was my first resin kit I had some trouble with the pinning of the kit, especially where the arm connects to the body because it would tend to rotate on me so I had to have two pins. I also had trouble getting the head to stay in the position I wanted, but I managed to solve this when I drilled a larger hole for the pin and used a 3/32" brass rod instead of paper clips.

I first painted the wing and used straight Tamiya Acrylic Flat Black. It came out pretty well. I had wanted to try to emulate the pearly black luster that FilmMkr got on one of his newer kits, Daphne's Surprise, but didn't want to spend the extra money on PearlEx powders. I found Delta Creamcoat sells this Pearl stuff so I tried that but it was really hard to get a good even effect so after doing a test I decided to not do it on the actual wing.

I clearcoated the wing with some Future and then after about half an hour tried to lightly sand it to get it smoother, but it started to take some paint off. After trying to handbrush some black on I realized that the alcohol used to thin the paint was reacting with the paint already on the part and in the end I decided to just dunk the piece in degreaser and repaint it. This time I waited a full day to let the Future cure and then rubbed some Tamiya Finishing Compound on it to get it smoother.

Next up was painting the flesh tones. I did not want to spend too much money all at once so I opted to go with Delta Creamcoats for the skin tone. I used a formula from GKJapan.com:

3 parts white

1 part parchment

1 part tangerine orange

Using that ratio it came out a bit too orangy for me so I then added a bit more white and parchment to lighten it up a bit since Seras is a vampire after all!

After spraying a few coats of this I used chalk pastels to shade the kit. I got some Faber-Castell chalk pastels at a local art store and they work great. I just followed what FilmMkr does and rubbed some onto a sheet of sandpaper and then tapped the pastels into the areas I wanted to shade. I then blew off the pastels and blended it away from the applied area. It took a few applications to get the color to build up. After the application I sealed it with a coat of Future to prevent the shading from getting wiped off when I mask it.

I have also been working on a base for the kit. My plan is to have the base to have a cobblestone look since Hellsing takes place in England and I thought that the cobblestones would fit. I used a small square wooden base from Michael's and painted the base black.

Then I made a box frame out of some cardboard and poured plaster of paris into it about an inch high. I remember FichtenFoo making a stone lighthouse using this method and thought that if he got good results I should just go ahead and try to emulate that.

After the plaster dried I sanded the top a bit to make it flatter so the figure would be able to stand flat on the base. I then used scribing tools to carve out a cobblestone pattern. I plan on painting it with some acrylics.

Some reference images for the cobblestone:

And after scribing the plaster I was able to get a suitable pattern in the base.